Top 500 Daphne du Maurier Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “With Rebecca we enter a world of dreams and daydreams, but they always threaten to tip over into nightmare.”

— Daphne du Maurier

102. “It is not easy to be gallant in an apple tree. Perhaps you will tell your mother.”

— Daphne du Maurier

103. “It seemed to me, as I sat there in bed, staring at the wall, at the sunlight coming in at the window, at Maxim’s empty bed, that there was nothing quite so shaming, so degrading as a marriage that had failed.”

— Daphne du Maurier

104. “There was something strangely peaceful about the house, something very rare and difficult to define. It was like a house in an old tale, discovered by the hero one evening in midsummer. In the tale there would be strands of ivy clustering the walls, and barring the entrance and the house itself would have slept for a thousand years.”

— Daphne du Maurier

105. “Mrs. Van Hopper liked to concentrate on food, and I could tell by the way the sauce ran down her chin that her dish of ravioli pleased her.”

— Daphne du Maurier

106. “Mary lost count of time and space; the miles might have been a hundred and the hour midnight, for ail she knew. She began to cling to the safety of the coach; at least it had some remnant of familiarity. She had known it since the early morning, and that was long ago. However great a nightmare was this eternal drive, there were at least the four close walls to protect her, the shabby leaking roof, and, within calling distance, the comfortable presence of the driver.”

— Daphne du Maurier

107. “I had an uneasy feeling we might be asked to spend the approaching Christmas with Beatrice. Perhaps I could have influenza.”

— Daphne du Maurier

108. “I believe there is a theory that men and women emerge finer and stronger after suffering, and that to advance in this or any world we must endure ordeal by fire. This we have done in full measure, ironic though it seems. We have both known fear, and loneliness, and very great distress. I suppose sooner or later in the life of everyone comes a moment of trial. We all of us have our particular devil who rides us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end.”

— Daphne du Maurier

109. “And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.”

— Daphne du Maurier

110. “We were dreamers, both of us, unpractical, reserved, full of great theories never put to test, and, like all dreamers, asleep to the waking world. Disliking our fellow men, we craved affection; but shyness kept impulse dormant until the heart was touched.”

— Daphne du Maurier

111. “He belonged to a walled city of the fifteenth century, a city of narrow, cobbled streets, and thin spires, where the inhabitants wore pointed shoes and worsted hose. His face was arresting, sensitive, medieval in some strange inexplicable way, and I was reminded of a portrait seen in a gallery, I had forgotten where, of a certain Gentleman Unknown.”

— Daphne du Maurier

112. “I’m afraid it does not concern me very much what Mrs. de Winter used to do,” I said. “I am Mrs. de Winter now, you know.”

— Daphne du Maurier

113. “A denial heralded the thrice crowing of a cock, and an insincerity was like the kiss of Judas.”

— Daphne du Maurier

114. “He can’t get rid of me, he can’t shake himself clear. It has happened all my life, this business of clinging to people, of getting too fond of them.”

— Daphne du Maurier

115. “She wondered if this was how a ship felt when the security of harbor was left behind. No vessel could feel more desolate than she did, not even if the wind thundered in the rigging and the sea licked her decks.”

— Daphne du Maurier

116. “The man looked at her curiously. “Jamaica Inn?” he said. “What would you be doing at Jamaica Inn? That’s no place for a girl. You must have made a mistake, surely.” He stared at her hard, not believing her.”

— Daphne du Maurier

117. “We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still too close to us.”

— Daphne du Maurier

118. “In love. He had not said anything yet about being in love. No time perhaps. It was all so hurried at the breakfast table. Marmalade, and coffee, and that tangerine. No time. The tangerine was very bitter. No, he had not said anything about being in love. Just that we would be married. Short and definite, very original.”

— Daphne du Maurier

119. “This car had the wings of Mercury, I thought, for higher yet we climbed, and dangerously fast, and the danger pleased me because it was new to me, because I was young.”

— Daphne du Maurier

120. “In a little while it would be different, there would come tomorrow, and the next day, and another year. And we would be changed perhaps, never sitting quite like this again. Some of us would go away, or suffer, or die; the future stretched away in front of us, unknown, unseen, not perhaps what we wanted, not what we planned. This moment was safe though, this could not be touched.”

— Daphne du Maurier

121. “Now you are here, let me show you everything,” she said, her voice ingratiating and sweet as honey, horrible, false, “I know you want to see it all, you’ve wanted to for a long time, and you were too shy to ask. It’s a lovely room, isn’t it? The loveliest room you have ever seen.”

— Daphne du Maurier

122. “I was like a little scrubby schoolboy with a passion for a sixth-form prefect, and he kinder, and far more inaccessible.”

— Daphne du Maurier

123. “For the sake of your bright eyes, Jem Merlyn.”

— Daphne du Maurier

124. “Make the drummer announce me,” I whispered, “make him beat the drum, you know how they do, and then call out Miss Caroline de Winter. I want to surprise them below.”

— Daphne du Maurier

125. “It was a mistake to separate us. We should have stayed together. Once a family breaks up and splits, it never comes together again. Not in the old way. If there had been a settled home to which we could have gone, it would have been different. Children need a settled home, a place that smells familiar. A life that goes on, with the same toys, the same walks, the same faces day after day. Where, wet or fine, existence can be a pattern, a routine. We had no pattern. Not after Mama died.”

— Daphne du Maurier

126. “We were dreamers, both of us, unpractical, reserved, full of great theories never put to test, and, like all dreamers, asleep to the waking world.”

— Daphne du Maurier

127. “I like simple things, books, being alone, or someone who understands.”

— Daphne du Maurier

128. “I thought about being placid, how quiet and comfortable it sounded, someone with knitting on her lap, with calm unruffled brow. Someone who was never anxious, never tortured by doubt and indecision, someone who never stood as I did, hopeful, eager, frightened, tearing at bitten nails, uncertain which way to go, what star to follow.”

— Daphne du Maurier

129. “She sat huddled in her corner, swaying from side to side as the coach was shaken, and it seemed to her that never before had she known there was malevolence in solitude.”

— Daphne du Maurier

130. “No crisis can break through the crust of habit.”

— Daphne du Maurier

131. “I can tell by the way he will look lost and puzzled suddenly, all expression dying away from his dear face as though swept clean by an unseen hand, and in its place a mask will form, a sculptured thing, formal and cold, beautiful still but lifeless.”

— Daphne du Maurier

132. “His demon of depression was always ready to close in upon him and stifle him, shutting out the beauty and loveliness of life, reminding him that blindness would one day be his, turning his little world to darkness. He used to hold out his hand before his eye. ‘Pem, it’s not so clear as it was. I can’t focus when I look this way. It’s getting worse, I tell you.”

— Daphne du Maurier

133. “If I told you I was thinking about Surrey and Middlesex I was thinking about Surrey and Middlesex. Men are simpler than you imagine, my sweet child. But what goes on in the twisted tortuous minds of women would baffle anyone.”

— Daphne du Maurier

134. “You’ve taken me out of myself, out of despondency and introspection, both of which have been my devils for a year.”

— Daphne du Maurier

135. “We can never go back again, that much is certain.”

— Daphne du Maurier

136. “I believed, in her strange way, that she had loved us both, but we had become dispensable. Something other than blind emotion directed her actions after all. Perhaps she was two persons, torn in two, first one having sway and then the other.”

— Daphne du Maurier

137. “When people suffer a great shock, like death, or the loss of a limb, I believe they don’t feel it just at first. If your hand is taken from you you don’t know, for a few minutes, that your hand is gone. You go on feeling the fingers.”

— Daphne du Maurier

138. “But you know the old saying? Out of sight, out of mind. If people aren’t there to be talked about the talk dies. It’s the way of the world.”

— Daphne du Maurier

139. “You thought I was mad. Perhaps I was. Perhaps I am. It doesn’t make for sanity, does it, living with the devil.”

— Daphne du Maurier

140. “If I heard it, even among a thousand others, I should recognize her voice. Rebecca, always Rebecca. I should never be rid of Rebecca.”

— Daphne du Maurier

141. “For I had no illusions left now, I no longer made any effort to pretend. Last night had shown me too well. My marriage was a failure. All the things that people would say about it if they knew, were true. We did not get on. We were not companions. We were not suited to one another. I was too young for Maxim, too inexperienced, and, more important still, I was not of his world.”

— Daphne du Maurier

142. “It was disturbing, like an enchanted place. I had not thought it could be as beautiful as this.”

— Daphne du Maurier

143. “She sat with her chin cupped in her hands, her eyes fixed on the window splashed with mud and rain, hoping with a sort of desperate interest that some ray of light would break the heavy blanket of sky, and but a momentary trace of that lost blue heaven that had mantled Helford yesterday shine for an instant as a forerunner of fortune.”

— Daphne du Maurier

144. “He could see her planting violets on his grave, a solitary figure in a grey cloak. What a ghastly tragedy. A lump came to his throat. He became quite emotional thinking of his own death. He would have to write a poem about this. – from a Difference in Temperament.”

— Daphne du Maurier

145. “How soft and gentle her name sounds when I whisper it. It lingers on the tongue, insidious and slow, almost like poison, which is apt indeed. It passes from the tongue to the parched lips, and from the lips back to the heart. And the heart controls the body, and the mind also. Shall I be free of it one day?”

— Daphne du Maurier

146. “Listen, my sweet. When you were a little girl, were you ever forbidden to read certain books, and did your father put those books under lock and key?” “Yes,” I said. “Well, then. A husband is not so very different from a father after all. There is a certain type of knowledge I prefer you not to have. It’s better kept under lock and key. So that’s that. And now eat up your peaches, and don’t ask me any more questions, or I shall put you in the corner.”

— Daphne du Maurier

147. “It’s true his wife was a scold, but that was no excuse to kill her. If we killed women for their tongues all men would be murderers.”

— Daphne du Maurier

148. “She had to live in this bright, red gabled house with the nurse until it was time for her to die... I thought how little we know about the feelings of old people. Children we understand, their fears and hopes and make-believe.”

— Daphne du Maurier

149. “Time could not wreck the perfect symmetry of those walls, nor the site itself, a jewel in the hollow of a hand.”

— Daphne du Maurier

150. “I loved you too much, wanted you too much, had for you too great a tenderness. Now all of this is like a twisted root in my heart, a deadly poison in my brain. You have made of me a madman. You fill me with a kind of horror, a devastating hate that is akin to love – a hunger that is nausea.”

— Daphne du Maurier